“It could have been a lot worse. There is a lot of slander when people think nobody is listening. But I am sorry for the language used as there were young children watching and I apologised. We had assumed that we had gone to a break.

"I think when you make a mistake, admit that you make a mistake.

On last night’s Brazil v Mexico match, host Bill O'Herlihy asked Dunphy about the affect of the level of expectation the Brazilian players were experiencing and while Dunphy described the demeanour of Neymar before he scored a penalty against Croatia last Thursday he used the word "f**king".

"When Neymar was shaping up to take that penalty, I thought he was f**king dreading it," he said.

The veteran pundit seemed genuinely unaware that he was on air when O'Herlihy made him aware of the fact that his blooper had gone out to the viewers.

Before RTE headed over to their coverage of the game, O'Herlihy said: "Sorry about our hiccup there, it was entirely accidental."

Speaking on the Sean O’Rourke show this morning on RTE Radio, Dunphy said his usage of the f-word live on air during RTE’s World Cup coverage was not comparable with derogatory comments made by former TV pundit Ron Atkinson or Andy Gray and Richard Keyes.

“I wouldn’t have those thoughts in my head. If you don’t have any of those thoughts in your head, you wouldn’t say it. On the scale of things, it was a venal rather than a mortal sin.”